Sunday, September 15, 2013

Family time is precious. With this in mind, I made the decision to
spend this summer enjoying children, their spouses, and our 7
grandchildren rather than travelling to outdoor art shows. One
daughter and her family live in Ecuador now, but came up for the
summer. We came together in New York, Virginia and
Massachusetts enjoying each other, including cuddling
two new grandbabies.

Here in Boston while our 8 year old grandson was at Taekwondo
camp, his 5 year old sister, Eliana, who tells everyone she is an
artist, requested "Nana art camp". Their parents were busy
launching a new non-profit library and literacy project. (Stay
tuned for more of that in future blog posts.)
Here are images and descriptions of some Nana art camp
activities. We covered lots of media and took field trips
for extra inspiration.

Clay - experimenting with textures, balls, and making coil pots

After firing...we opted for painting with acrylics, rather than glazing:

One finished tall coil pot:

Mixed media sculpture - a walk around the neighborhood, and
search in my studio resulted in this stone/wire/bead creature:

Two field trips to the Museum of Fine arts provided lots of
inspiration. Eliana's brother joined us for the trip to see the
Samurai armor exhibit: http://www.mfa.org/exhibitions/samurai
to see incredible craftsmanship in leather, wood and bronze.
The dragon mask below was made to be worn by a horse.

Eliana and I checked out the Hippie Chic exhibit:

.http://www.mfa.org/exhibitions/hippie-chic Eliana
imagined her Nana wearing some of the outfits. (Somehow
some of the outfits didn't seem too far off today's garb.)
Though I have to admit I never felt quite as stylish in
the 60's as the models looked and didn't have white hair.

Eliana spent a long time looking at shapes and sketching

dress designs, and choosing her favorites. She finished

the design below back at home:

Looks like one I might have worn...or might now.

We stitched up a new "work" dress for her doll.

Every artist needs a place to store things. A painted plastic box
was perfect to keep a few items found in my studio to take back
to Ecuador to continue to working there.
Learning about promotion is important for aspiring artists
so I encouraged Eliana to design and decorate her own
business cards:

Then she decided she needed a leather card holder.

Well...yes it did look like the ones I make. She saw me working
and asked me to show her hot to make them.As you can see in the
photo above with the cards..she added her own style and color to
the finished holder. I was sorry this skillful apprentice couldn't
stay around to help with my inventory this Fall.

Another field trip to a neighborhood site which was filled with
large paintings and sculpture this summer offered further
inspiration: http://bartlettevents.org/ You never know what
awesome art might be just around the corner!